55 million years? it's highly possible that I wouldn't think we'll be in Africa, anymore , Toto. (Also reminds me of the time I dumped some coins in and punched up the momentarily popular song "I Should Be So Lucky" a couple of dozen times into the jukebox queue just a few short minutes b...

Fresh new helm and cloak You gotta like that, now your army's gonna broke. So move, from the field unravel As I make fly girl, then catch my gavel. While it's moving, watch out Bump a little bit and you'll know it's gonna clout. Like that, like that Goes on a mission, then flies on back. The dwarves...

you just can't write complex algorithms in BASIC (you don't have recursion, abstract data types, dynamic allocation) Can't you? You could on the BBC Micro. All of those, albeit the middle one was fiddly by today's standards, but the other two were routine if not expected. Clearly the Gates-empire i...

China's Communist government isn't too keen on Christianity, either It seems they're equal opportunity then. Why isn't this in the news? As far as I'm concerned, it's old news. Chinese Government is being Chinese Government. Though that people are unaware of the ideological battle for faith (Diety ...

Ok, so what exactly is a Dremel? I tried looking it up, but all I got was that it is a company that is known for "hand held rotary tools", but that doesn't really help me either, and honestly makes me think of phones. Also they apparently make such diverse other products as hot glue guns ...

IIRC, the distinction between burglary and robbery is that in robbery, the offender confronts the victim and uses intimidation pr violence to get them to hand over the goods, whereas burglary involves an attempt to abscond with the goods before the victims even know that a theft has occurred. Exact...

This "sale" must have been running for a decade now. This discussion from 2009a decade shows you how world-weary it already was, then. ;) (The placenames "Thorp Arch, Carcroft and Hull" eternally resonate to me, either as DFS's original locations or of the prexecessor/parent com...

↶ ²Umm, except for if they're entirely irrational and don't conveniently overlap-to-infinity with everything else, I suppose. But to arbitrary precision well beyond any usefulness they pretty much will. Eh, I'm sure you can just come up with some arithmetic progression dictating the digits you need...

Underwear is not an advertising trope I've personally come across, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least. The post office is in reference to stamps.com, which is incredibly prolific with its podcast advertising. I seem to avoid the 'sponsored podcasts' most of the time (maybe because I subscribe...

The true ratios (that we currently don't even know) of quark masses, not just the up/down one, will ² feature in Pi. By stating that (pi - e) is the first ratio¹ can you then, @qc, logically extend that to a prediction of charm to strange (hovers loosely around 13.5, or its inverse if there's reason...

I vote for making Pluto a better planet. You mean making Pluto a better dwarf planet. No, it's Ok as a dwarf planet, so far as I'm currently aware. I'd like to make it a better planet. First, let's sweep its orbit clear We can probably even use Neptune for something else, because nobody actually ne...

(Snap! That's exactly the list *I* was using, and your figures don't look different to what I quickly got before the weekend took me away from it. But you got to the pathfinding bit before me. Fair enough. Maybe I'll optimise and nicify the script for others' consumption. It's an unreadable munge-me...

Kim Stanley Robinson used "areoforming", I believe (I'll check the books later), but that wasn't 'terraforming Mars' or 'Marsifying Earth', rather making people suited to Mars (with futuretech biological tweaks) while applying measures to make Mars something (not totally Earthlike) that th...

Onboard power would be one factor. Decrease the size and the output of the cell(s) you can use reduces, with fewer watts (by way of volts and/or amps, depending on what you sacrifice). And they're likely to to have the same thickness of casing/internal partitioning, eating up more 'power volume', wi...

Some people, I know*, will have downright detested this series like they detested the recent Ghostbusters*. And they* throw around the term meaniehead ( edit: <= it seems that currently the forum 'corrects' to "meaniehead" from "Ess Jay Doubleyou", and I have no objection at all ...

Well, sounds good (so far). Often laptop screens are hinged with deliberate friction between the hinge-plates (to keep the screen isat the chosen open angle), and maybe the laptop screws in the base case that were missing allowed the base hinge plate halves to move excessively in their seats when po...

Click? As in high frequency fan-rub/spokey-dokey-like? Random mechanical sounds when sat still (possibly accompanying hard disk access)? A rattle when you manhandle it (on or off)? Speaking of which, it sounds like you throw it around (comparatively). Maybe invest in a better bag that stops you thro...

Additional possibly optimisation: I'd sort of havered over the "build the net from the start" bit, because lists-of-lists-of-nodes-of-a-net is getting highly structural. But when you have the net, it's likely (though not definite) that a longest-chain will have terminator nodes with just a...

It's a good thing he didn't ask about naked short selling . That's going out onto a trading floor wearing only the "nevernude" items from the series Arrested Development, isn't it? Wouldn't the person you borrowed them from be annoyed that their stocks are now worth less than they were? W...